Funding our future: Wow! The government has agreed to support Flip the Fleet throughout 2018 with a grant from its Low Emission Vehicles Contestable Fund (see http://flipthefleet.org/2018/government-funds-flip-fleet/). The funding will be used to make it easier for people to sign-up and contribute data, implement improvements to the database, automate data collection in fleets, and share the lessons learnt from existing EV owners with prospective EV buyers. We thank all 540 of you that are participating so far – there is no doubt that your sharing of knowledge, data and testimony underpinned this funding success.

New team members: The government’s funding allows us to hire Monica Peters, Morgan Knoesen and Danial Myall to help Flip the Fleet.

Rapid-Charger Survey: Many of you very valiantly battled to the end of our ‘choice model’ on what matters most in placement of rapid chargers – thanks! A full report on your preferences is being prepared and will be posted soon.

Altogether 109 EV owners completed the survey between 20 December 2017 and 20 January 2018. Here are a few sneak previews of the results:

Over the past three months, 90% of the respondents used a fast charger on average 6 times (twice per month). The uncertainty band was 5 to 8 times over the three months.

A minority of EV owners use them a lot – the maximum estimate was around 100 visits in the 3 months (more than once a day)

Users had to wait 14% of the time (uncertainty band 12% – 16%)

On the occasions where you had to wait for your turn, the average wait time was 10 minutes (9 – 12 minutes) – the worst case was 40 minutes

Chargers were faulty 3.6% of the time (2.7% to 4.8%)

You were prevented from charging by a parked Internal Combustion Vehicle (“ICEd”) 2.2% of the time (1.5% – 3.2%) on average throughout the country

Otago (actually nearly all records will have been from Dunedin) is the ICEd capital of the world! Their EVs were blocked 10 % of the time (uncertainty band 6% to 15%), whereas EVers around the rest of the country encountered these spoilers 1% of the time (uncertainty band 0.5% to 2%)

Nearly all of you reckon you need more rapid chargers in your region!

More 30 kWh Leafs please: We still don’t have enough 30 KWh Leafs to test some ideas we are developing about battery health. If you know of people with these models, please encourage them to sign up to Flip the Fleet. And we hope that more of those who have already signed up would be willing to have their battery scanned – if so, please send us a note and phone number to wecan@flipthefleet.org and we’ll try to get someone in your area to drop in to do the scan.

Can any of you provide repairs and maintenance cost data for your ICVs? You are providing awesome data on monthly repairs and maintenance costs of your EVs and PHEVs – now we need some data from Internal Combustion Vehicles to compare against. See http://flipthefleet.org/2018/low-repairs-maintenance-costs-double-bonus-owning-ev/ for how you can help us estimate the full running cost savings of EVs and PHEVs.

This month’s hint to get the most out of Flip the Fleet’s dashboard: You can get a complete printout of your own data by scrolling to the last sheet of reports (hit the >> chevrons at the top or ‘Last page’ green button at the very bottom). Click on the dump truck and your data will download in Excel.